Santa Claus Needs a New PR Guy! Christmas 2008, like so many Christmases past, has had its share of stress-induce rises in crime rates. Especially crimes that are related to the pressures of the times, and probably all in some way shape or form related to the economy. Santa Claus too was affected by the economy. Santa.net was my pet project since 1996 when I started it to keep my young son, battling a cold at the time, entertained. But it became habit forming. The letters to Santa Claus were first to make me realize that there was more to gain than invest with maintaining Santa.net. The letters, in and of themselves were enough to make the whole task worthwhile. Most years I didn’t even bother to try to offset the investment with some kind of income-generating plan. We never gave that a college try. One year I tried to keep my sister busy doing something so I let her handle the “Letters from Santa”. She had a great time. And this year we ran some Google Adsense Ads. That put a little back in the kitty, but the Santa Claus, Elf and Reindeer animations we do on Santa.net are labor intensive and a lot of people spend a lot of hours doing them… Add to that the programming and site maintenance and, if you know anything about what these things cost, you’ll understand that ours is a labor of love.
It really bothers me when I see a search for “Santa” turn up Christmas Party Shooting by Santa Claus, Santa Claus Molestation Letters, People run down in roller rinks, and anything you could possibly imagine that would effectively erase the spirit of the holiday for a web surfer with his children at his side. What makes one think that when someone does a search for “Santa” on Christmas Eve, he or she is looking to find a story about child molestation or Santa Claus shooting up a bunch of kids to share with his or her kids and family. Why is it that the sensationalist news media gets to push the Santa websites off the front page? Santa.net was very lucky, we were on page one right through Christmas Eve. But why in the name of well written and well intentioned algorithms would this be meant to happen. Is that the plan for Christmas? Some years the Grinch does his dirty work. But can’t we design an algorithm that offers the Grinch a little less help?
When it comes time for me to search for something important, Google is the only search engine that provides real meaningful results. I don’t want them to change, I just want to drop something into the suggestion box… And maybe a set of presets to tailor the search to different situations… For instance, one present for searching when web surfing with the kids, one for work-related, and you can “train it” by voting down or up good-relevant results and down objectionable or unrelated results. (Much like the spam filters work.) Just a few thoughts:):)